Who are you?

My name is Dan Shipper. In 2012 (my sophomore year of college) I started a company called Firefly with some friends. Since that time we bootstrapped our way to the mid-six figures in revenue and are used by thousands of SMBs, financial advisors, and a few huge companies. In July we sold the company to Pega. Read more about the experience here.

This blog has attracted over a half a million readers since I started writing my freshman year of college. You can read about me in:

What is Distilled Thinking?

The problem with writing about entrepreneurship is that it's generally written by two types of people:

1. People who take a practical approach: "It worked for me, therefore it will work for you."

2. People who take an intellectual approach: "There are deep reasons why things should work this way, therefore it will work for you."

The problem with a purely practical approach is that it's generally myopic. It's hard to have a broad, relevant world-view if the only experiences you learn from are your own.

The problem with a purely intellectual approach is that it's very easy to come to wild conclusions that have no bearing on reality but sound good. This kind of armchair entrepreneurship produces books and blog posts with nice-sounding titles, but end up having little long-term relevance.

A term coined by Nassim Taleb, Distilled Thinking is thinking with all of the cruft stripped away.

It's an attempt to see through short-lived trends, and to try to understand how the world works below the surface.

Although I'm not always successful at it, I try to marry a practical and intellectual approach to entrepreneurship to try to tease out the things that happen as I build my company from the ground up. I try to come to cautious conclusions, and make clear the times when I'm unsure, instead of pontificating for page-views.

It’s been a pretty wild ride these last two months and today I’m proud to announce that after exactly 60 days DomainPolish has generated 2,905.45 in revenue. This is unbelievably higher than I ever expected (my goal for the project was to make $5) and before I break down more of the experience I would just like to thank every single one of my customers for being awesome.

Visitors

Over the past 60 days DomainPolish has had 10,936 visits, and 8,538 uniques or 142.3 uniques/day. Most of that traffic is direct, from Google searches for “domainpolish” or referrals from blog posts both by me and by others about DomainPolish.

Conversion Rate

From 8,538 visitors I’ve made 133 sales for a pretty average 1.5% conversion rate. Total revenue from sales has been $1,401 over two months. I’ve done a few things to try and raise this rate by creating landing pages for different types of visitors and driving traffic to it through AdWords (see an example at here) but I haven’t seen any significant results from that strategy yet.

The Rest of The Revenue

“But if you only made $1,401 from actual sales, where did you get the other 1504.45 from?” You might ask. Well, the other $1504.45 comes from a source that I highly recommend. I ended up licensing the codebase to someone else who wanted to build an app for Mechanical Turk but that wasn’t in the same space as DomainPolish. It was just about the easiest $1,500 I’ve ever made and the guy who bought it is awesome. He’s using it to review dating profiles with Mechanical Turk and the site’s not live yet but make sure to check it out once it is.

Custom Thank You Videos

I’m really working hard to make the DomainPolish experience great, and to do things in the beginning that don’t necessarily scale but are awesome. So I ended up making individual custom thank you videos for almost every single DomainPolish customer. The response to these videos has been awesome, and I think it’s really results in a good amount of recurring revenue from happy customers, or through recommendations.

Official Amazon Mechanical Turk Partner

DomainPolish also just became an official Amazon Mechanical Turk partner (pending a lot of paperwork.) This means that we’ll be on the Amazon website, and their sales team will recommend DomainPolish to their customers if they want to review websites. I’ll also be able to throw the Amazon logo onto our site which I’m pretty excited about.

Moving Forward

My goal is to double my revenue for October to $6,000. Because I have to constantly acquire new customers for DomainPolish this is going to be a pretty hard thing to do. My plan right now is to recruit freelance web designers to sell DomainPolish as a white-label service to their customers. I really think that this is a win-win for both freelancers and DomainPolish so if you are a freelancer and are reading this I would love to talk to you. Email me at dan [at] danshipper.com.

This is part one of a series of posts describing my experience interviewing at Y Combinator this past summer.

Interviewing at YC is a lot like the first time you have sex. You’re trying very hard to convince the other person that you know what you’re doing, and it’s all over much too quickly.

During the middle of my freshman year at UPenn two friends, Wesley Zhao and Ajay Mehta, and I created a weekend app called WhereMyFriends.Be. It was a very simple Facebook API/Google Maps API mashup that just mapped all of your Facebook friends on a map. After we created it we cold-emailed a bunch of tech blogs about it and waited to hear back. To our complete surprise Mashable agreed to cover it, and it was our first taste of real success.